I'll respond to your question on apprenticeship. In addition to having a low completion rate in apprentices' trades, it's actually falling as well, which is pretty serious.
We don't really have a definitive understanding of the reasons behind that. There's a national apprenticeship survey in the field right now to look at this issue. It could be linked to the fact that there's not a lot of economic incentive for an apprentice to finish. The wage of a completer might not be that much higher than a non-completer. It could be that the curriculum is not particularly relevant to the apprentice, or it could be that the apprentice doesn't have the literacy skills to do the in-school portion of the apprenticeship.
So there are a lot of reasons there, but certainly from the point of view of employability, it's much greater if you have your ticket, if you have finished the program and passed, than if you don't.